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The Preservers of the Daughters of Zion Cemetery and the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society cordially invite you to attend DECORATION DAY, 2 pm Sunday, May 27, 2018, at the Daughters of Zion Cemetery, corner of Oak and South First Streets, Charlottesville.

Following the ceremony we will gather at the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, 200 Second Street, N.E., for refreshments, jazz, and the “Gone But Not Forgotten” Exhibit.

Please plan on joining us on a field trip to Tinkling Springs Presbyterian Church in Fishersville, Virginia. It is the second oldest Presbyterian congregation in the Shenandoah Valley, founded in 1740. Its historic building is on the National Register of Historic Places.

We will meet at the church at 10:30 am on Saturday, May 19.

Please note the date. It is May 19, the third Saturday of the month. This field trip is in lieu of our regular monthly meeting.

We will spend about an hour at the church and then drive to the library as described below and spend about an hour at the library.

For more information about the church, see https://tinklingspring.com/history/.

After our visit to the church and the surrounding burial grounds, we will have the opportunity to visit the Genealogy Library of the Augusta County Genealogical Society in Fishersville, just a short drive away from the church.

If you think you would like to join us on this outing, please let us know so that we can give the church an estimate of attendance. Please email us at http://cvgaboard@gmail.com.

Our April 2018 speaker will be Zann Nelson. She will tell us about the 1834 sale of 16 enslaved people of color by former President James Madison of Orange County, Virginia. His cousin, William Taylor, purchased them and subsequently moved them to Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana.

The program will touch lightly on the domestic slave trade while focusing more specifically on the effort by Ms. Nelson to identify the 16, learn more about their lives, and ultimately locate and connect with living descendants.

Covered in the PowerPoint presentation will be the numerous challenges, a few of the tools utilized in tackling the investigation and the status of the project.

Ms. Nelson is a researcher, writer and public speaker, president of History Quest, and a columnist at “Buried Truth” and “Zann’s Place”. She is working on a special project, The African American Descendents’ Quest.

Learn more about Ms. Nelson’s work at her website, www.historyinvestigator.net or at her Facebook page, History Investigator. She can be reached by telephone at 540-718-3465.

If you have had a DNA test done and are willing to share your ethnic percentages (no personal information needed), sculptor Patty Swygert will convert your data into a color-coded pie chart and mount it on translucent silk panels in a grid with other charts from the community. Using color-matching thread, she will link similar colors of your chart to similar colors of other charts.

The sculpture is designed to address our uniqueness and diversity (the pie charts) and our interconnectedness (the web of colored threads) and will be part of the international art event, Art in Odd Places/Charlottesville. It will be on display on April 5, 2018 (10 am-5 pm) in front of Booker Hall at UVA (across from the Corner) and on April 6, 2018 (10 am-5 pm) near the fountain on the downtown mall.

The sculpture consists of three panels: one including pie charts for the UVA community (students, faculty, staff, alumni), one for residents of the greater Charlottesville area, and one for residents of the rest of Virginia. Hopefully, the sculpture will grow as more people volunteer their percentages.

You can submit your percentages via email (pcs5g@virginia.edu) or by mail to: Patty Swygert, 5724 Lawson Lane, Earlysville, VA 22936. Please indicate whether you are affiliated with UVA, a resident of greater Charlottesville, or from anywhere else in Virginia, so she will know which panel to put your chart on.

Ms. Swygert also invites those of you interested in genealogy to stop by the sculpture to chat with onlookers about genealogy.

This transcription project is a collaboration between historians, social scientists, and the African American Civil War Museum. Their goals are to improve our knowledge of the African Americans who fought for freedom in the American Civil War, to provide descendants with access to information on their ancestors, and to present students of history with primary documents from a pivotal moment in African American history. To do this we are building a comprehensive database of the estimated 200,000 soldiers who formed the United States Colored Troops (USCT).

Exploring Your Family’s Past – One Page at a Time

The Virginia Genealogical Society Spring Conference is scheduled for April 27-28, 2018 in Richmond, Virginia. Friday is a day of research at the Library of Virginia. The Saturday session, at the Four Points by Sheraton near the Richmond airport, features three interest tracks. Early registration ends April 1. Click here for additional information and the registration form.

“During the 18th and 19th centuries, naming practices among Virginia’s planter class were purposeful and surprisingly consistent. Maternal surnames were preserved as “first” names. Grandparents and, sometimes, rather pointedly, wealthy aunts and uncles were remembered in succeeding generations. These practices frequently give valuable clues to family connections. Often, they also result in multiple individuals with the same name, living concurrently in the same county. This can be maddening for researchers. As time passes, biographies become conflated, and genealogists can spend years untangling crisscrossing lives.…”

For the rest of this article, and several others, CVGA members should go to “Members Only” on the menu bar above, and choose “Central Virginia Heritage — Current Issue.” (Note: You have to be logged in to this website in order to see “Members Only.”)

For those who are not members, we offer the opportunity to purchase a printed copy of each issue. The Spring 2018 issue is available from https://www.amazon.com/dp/1986488012 for $6.50. Click on the Amazon.com link above or search for “Central Virginia Heritage” on Amazon.com.

If you have trouble logging in to the site to download your copy, or if you have trouble with the CreateSpace.com site, please contact me at the webmaster link at the bottom of this page.

Bring your brick walls and your roadblocks to our next meeting on Saturday, March 10 for a roundtable discussion. We will put our heads together to help find a way to break through those pesky problems.

Don’t forget that we always like to hear about genealogy success stories, too, so if you have found a long sought-after marriage record or identified a mysterious person in an old photo or any such genealogy happiness, please bring it the meeting and tell us about it.

Please tell us what you think of the following proposal:

At the CVGA board meeting in January, there was a disussion about changing the time of our monthly meeting. Currently the meetings are held on the second Saturday of the month from 1:30 pm to 3:30 pm. The proposed change is to have the meetings from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm. The day of the meeting would stay the same, still on the second Saturday of the month.

One reason for the proposed change is this: the Family History Center in the church is open on Saturday mornings so there is a staff person in the building at that time to open the door for us. This change would eliminate the need for someone to return to the church in the afternoon.

The speaker for our February 10 program will be Alison Bell. She teaches Anthropology at Washington & Lee University. She holds a Ph.D in anthropology from the University of Virginia and an M.A. in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley. She is a Virginia Foundation for the Humanities Residential Fellow and has been studying cemeteries in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.

Ms. Bell is currently writing a book for the University of Tennessee Press, tentatively called The Vital Dead: Making Meaning, Identity, and Community through Cemeteries. The book will focus on some recent changes which she has observed in the cemeteries in the Valley of Virginia, commonly called the Shenandoah Valley.

In the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and well beyond, profound changes are underway in cemeteries: grave markers are still etched with images of bibles and flowers, but motorcycles, monsters, cats, and footballs are also appearing. Inscriptions (“Gone Hunting for the Lord” or “Had a Good Ride”) and objects lefts on grave sites — bird feeders, whirligigs, letters to the deceased — echo this florescence.

The meeting will take place from 1:30 pm-3:30 pm at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The address of the Church is 1275 Timberwood Blvd., Charlottesville, VA. It is located on the corner of Airport Road and Timberwood. Coming from U.S. 29, the entrance is on the right (north) side of Airport Road immediately before you reach the church. Drive to the back of the building where you will see the entrance to the Family History Center.